Mary: an Advent Meditation

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

I had to study that poem at school. It was my first introduction to any great twentieth century poet. I've never forgotten it. Auden takes Breughel's painting The Fall of Icarus as an example: the ploughman carries on ploughing, and the ship that has somewhere to get to sails calmly on; and all this while a boy falls catastrophically out of the sky. Disaster strikes: someone you love dies, or you are diagnosed as being terminally ill, or your marriage breaks up, or you lose your job. And you wonder how, just outside your universe that is disintegrating, another, ordinary world just carries on uncaring, oblivious.

But about ecstasy the artists and poets are never wrong either, and it is the same truth. You are in the seventh heaven, surprised by joy: you fall in love, or find a new friendship, or have a child, or meet God. And not far away, the rest of the human race is not aware of you, still less cares about what for you is making creation sing. It is as if in both agony and ecstasy, time is attenuated, given a new quality, seems to stand still. Einstein's theory of relativity talks about dilation when space-time is distorted close to the speed of light. It takes on a new quality. But everybody else's "ordinary" time just carries on as it always has. In a sense, it's as if we are living in different worlds until the ecstasy subsides or the agony begins to be healed, and the extraordinary merges with the ordinary once more.

Paintings and sculptures of the Annunciation often depict this double world. Inside her house, the Virgin Mary is rapt in contemplation, heaven reflected in her face as she is overwhelmed by the power of the Most High that has come from beyond the farthest star to visit her. On the other side of the window sheep are grazing, people buy and sell in the streets of a town, a farmer gathers his harvest. Something of this is what I see hinted at in Josef Pyrz' sculpture of the Annunciation in Durham Cathedral's Galilee Chapel. Rapture, toughness, acceptance, pain even are written into her face and body in a physical, tactile way. I used to encourage visitors to caress the sculpture to gain a sense of the complex emotional and spiritual power of this marvellous piece.

 

Edwin Muir captures it like this:

Outside the window footsteps fall

Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way.
Sound's perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered tune.

But through the endless afternoon

These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.

Beauty and tragedy are the soil in which contemplatives are made. Mary knew both: beauty her encounter with the angel of the Annunciation; tragedy in the sword that pierced her heart as she gazed on her Son at Golgotha. But it needed more than beauty or tragedy to make her the one we honour as Theotokos the God-bearer. Many people experience beauty and tragedy but are none the wiser for it. Their souls are not enriched, their capacity for contemplation is not deepened. What then was Mary's secret?

I think it was her gift for openness to the new thing that God was doing. Words like sensitivity and awareness come to mind, the gift of realising that the world is, as they say on Lindisfarne, a thin place, and that on the other side of that almost transparent membrane lies another realm, the realm of the spiritual, the heavenly, the transcendent. You see into the life of things, to quote Wordsworth. It is what Moses turned aside to see in the blazing bush and what Elijah heard in the still small voice, and what Mother Julian of Norwich understood in the hazel-nut she held in her hand that, she said, only existed because God loved it. And what the mystics down the centuries teach us is that ordinary life can become transparent, if we learn to see it in a new way, train our faculties of sensitivity and awareness in order to discover the world as a sacrament. After all, that is precisely what we do each Sunday at the eucharist, when we take ordinary things and find them to be divine. Lesser annunciations, you might say, are waiting to happen all around us, waiting to show us the new thing that God wants to do in our lives.  
 

And what about us? God wants us, I think, to become like Mary: each of us a  theotokos, a bearer of God to others. Outside Salisbury Cathedral is a statue of Mary by Elizabeth Frink. It depicts her walking vigorously away from the Cathedral, not because she doesn't like the worship there, but because she is taking the good news to the world. This is the Walking Madonna, the Mary of the Magnificat whose contemplative vision has turned her into a woman of action who is passionate for justice, for a world where wrong is righted, the hungry fed and the downtrodden exalted.

Whatever annunciations we are given, whatever angel we glimpse when time stands still, whether it is tragedy or joyous rapture, agony or ecstasy, there is call to be obeyed. Behold the servant of the Lord: let it be to me according to thy word. So that when the time comes for the angel to depart from us, and we return to our ordinary days, it will be with God conceived, so to speak, within us, so that we can lovingly bear him and bring him forth to a world that longs to be happy and that needs him so much.

Ave Maria, gratia plena
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you, and blessed is the fruit of your womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

The North East in Twelve Favourite Places 4: Rookhope

If you drive up the steep hill at the top of the East Allen valley beyond the village of Allenheads, you arrive at a watershed. It divides the Tyne catchment from the Wear, and is marked by a mighty cairn. To the north, you gaze across Northumberland where the Cheviot crowns the skyline when it is clear. To the south it is County Durham where the whale-backed hills of the North Pennines roll away towards Yorkshire. I once stood on this watershed one freezing New Year’s Eve admiring a colourful mid-afternoon sunset and thinking of the watersheds we travel in human life as one year passes and another takes its place.

The road winds down the valley of the Rookhope Burn. It’s a sparse, deserted landscape here in the “Land of the Prince-Bishops”, much bleaker than on the well-wooded Northumberland side. The poet W. H. Auden who loved the North Pennines called this valley “the most wonderfully desolate of all the dales”. The Bishops used to own great estates all over Weardale where they enjoyed hunting. Not any more; these days much of this majestic landscape consists of grouse moors. You know it’s the grouse-shooting season by the four by fours you will see parked on the roadside. 

You would think this was a purely natural Pennine landscape, not much interfered with by human hands. You would be wrong. For one thing, the forests that once covered the fells were levelled by the Dale’s first settlers. But later, valuable ores were discovered under these hills: lead primarily, but silver too, and iron, zinc and fluorspar.

The lead seams were known as far back as Roman times, but were most extensively worked in the nineteenth century. There is evidence everywhere of mining activity that has profoundly affected the look of these northern hills. There are lumpy spoil heaps long since claimed back by nature, hushes scarring the valley sides where water from reservoirs was released to rush down and expose the minerals, and there are entrances to abandoned pits and levels into which you walk at your peril.

The first landmark down the valley will be to many a striking and unexpected sight. It’s a mine complete with winding gear towering over the deserted dale. This is Groverake which started out as a lead mine but became a leading source of fluorspar until its closure in 1999. There is something haunting about these industrial ruins in their sombre setting. The pithead buildings are from the twentieth century and others, such as the pit owner’s ruined house, are Victorian. But it’s the most melancholy place I know in England. You realise in places like this how the tides have receded that once drove the “northern power house”.

A couple of miles further on, there is more evidence of how fortunes were made and lost in this dale. A stone arch in a field looks for all the world like a survival from Roman times. In fact, it is a relic of the two-mile Rookhope Chimney that carried poisonous gases from the lead smelting works in the village safely on to the moor. Well, that’s the charitable assumption. We know that in the nineteenth century, young children were sent into the chimney to scrape the walls for valuable silver deposits that had precipitated as the gases cooled. Maybe this was the real reason for the chimney. You dread to think what happened to those children who were forced say by day to absorb the lead-soaked atmosphere inside.

Today, Rookhope is not the industrial village it once was, populated by miners and their families and with a dozen pubs to serve them. It has gently subsided back into its remote stillness, a tranquillity broken only by cyclists travelling on the C2C cycle route that joins the Irish Sea to the North Sea. Many of them stay at the Rookhope Inn at the heart of the village. Here, fortified by a night’s rest, they set out to ride the long incline that ascends steeply out of the village towards Bolt’s Law. This was once a wagonway and then a true railway, powered by a stationary steam engine at the summit that hauled ore-filled wagons out of the valley on to a level track at the top. From there trains would connect with lines that led to the great industrial centres on Tyneside and Wearside. Bolt’s Incline makes a magnificent walk. At the summit you can explore the ruins of the engine house before striding out under great skies across Stanhope Moor. It’s a walk for autumn when the heather moors glow a brilliant purple.

Auden said that he found his poetic voice in this magical setting.

In Rookhope I was first aware
Of self and not-self, death and dread...

We once had a little lead-miner’s house in a terrace above the village (you can see the line of houses through the arch in the photo). You have to reckon with winter weather up there: the only way out of the village is up one hill or another. We have stories to tell about what it’s like knowing that you won’t get out until the roads are opened. But if it’s silence and solitude you’re looking for, you can do no better than the North Pennines. Some would say they are the best hills in England. Here in Tynedale, we are lucky to live on the edge of these fierce but glorious landscapes. 

Philip Larkin, Poets' Corner and Haydon Bridge

Tomorrow, a memorial to Philip Larkin will be unveiled in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey on the anniversary of his death on 2 December 1985. 

I can't let this occasion pass without offering a congratulatory salute from Haydon Bridge, the village in Northumberland where we have retired. For this was where Monica Jones, the companion and longest love of Larkin's life had come to live. He came here frequently to be with her from 1961 to 1984. In a sense he made his home here, no doubt a welcome change from the urban campus realities of his life in Hull where he was University Librarian.

Monica had a flat at 1a Ratcliffe Road, the house on the end of the Victorian terrace just by the eponymous bridge. This is the heart of the village where the road that drops steeply off the ridge carrying the Roman Wall meets the old road along the valley from Newcastle to Carlisle. In their day, traffic hurtled relentlessly past the house along the A69. Now there is a bypass and the villagers have reclaimed their streets and pavements. Outside the Co-Op on the corner opposite there is usually a huddle of people meeting and greeting one another, and dogs tethered to the lamp post while their owners are shopping. There are two pubs a stone's throw away, and a third just across the bridge. The pagoda tower of the late Georgian St Cuthbert's Church tops the townscape. Did Larkin ever darken its doors, if only as the curious but uncommitted visitor described in his famous poem Church Going who finds in this "serious house on serious earth" a place to grow wise in?

There is a blue plaque on the wall of Monica's house with a louche reference to a "secret love nest" - hardly a Larkinesque epithet, unless someone can tell me that he himself parodied the place in that way (which is not impossible). The plaque quotes him: "I thought your little house seemed...distinguished and exciting and beautiful...it looks splendid, and it can never be ordinary with the Tyne going by outside, a great English river drifting under your window, brown and muscled with currents!" It takes a poet to capture the sense of a place so succinctly. Though I doubt Larkin ever saw the Tyne surge free of its bounds, inundate the garden and knock at the front door as it did thanks to Storm Desmond a year ago on 5 December.

Andrew Motion's biography says that here the two of them "lazed, drank, read, pottered round the village and amused themselves with private games. The place always cheered them up" - "worked its spell" said Larkin. It's good to know that this little place wove a good magic on the poet. He was not the only one to find in these northern hills a source of joy and inspiration. W. H. Auden also loved the North Pennines that begin their steady rise up towards the high fells on the right bank of the river opposite 1a. Monica's house would lie in their shadow when the sun was low on winter afternoons.

I have long admired Philip Larkin. He had a marvellous ear for the sound of words, the sheer music of human language. On the day he died in 1985, we had a meeting of the Parochial Church Council at Alnwick where I was Vicar at the time. To introduce the meeting, I read aloud his enigmatic poem "Days".

What are days for?

Days are where we live.

They come, they wake us

Time and time over.

They are to be happy in:

Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question

Brings the priest and the doctor

In their long coats

Running over the fields.

I said I thought it was the job of a PCC on behalf of the local church to address this very question. It wasn't just for priests and doctors but for everyone since this universal question of what our days are for is faced by the entire human race. This was met with a certain bemusement. I went on to pray the Advent Collect with its reference to Christ coming among us in great humility, and coming again on the last Day (I emphasised that word in the light of the poem) to judge both the living and the dead. What are days for but to look forward to that Day, I suggested a trifle rhetorically. I'm not sure Larkin would have approved. But I wanted in a small way to pay tribute to the passing of a great poet. Soon after that, I went to work in Coventry, the city of his birth. I was amazed that Coventry had not taken the trouble to honour him in the way that Hull has done, and in a more modest fashion, Haydon Bridge.

The writer Blake Morrison will give the eulogy at tomorrow's unveiling in Westminster Abbey. He has his own way with words as anyone who has read his books, among them the brilliant memoir And When Did You Last See Your Father? knows. You don't need me to add to all that has been said about Larkin since his death, how he has been celebrated as one of the twentieth century's finest poets writing in English. And although he was hostile to organised religion, he seems to have had a feeling, an artist's instinct for the inward - might we call it spiritual? - dimension of life. "I may be an agnostic, but I'm an Anglican agnostic." I wouldn't hesitate to place him in the forefront of those poetic voices who have shone a light on the doubting, faltering and believing of Christians like me. With T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden in the previous generation and R.S. Thomas, Elizabeth Jennings and a few others of his own, he deserves to be recognised as one of those who have unflinchingly gazed into the human condition and helped us to come to terms with what it means to be a man or woman of faith.

If you want a sense of his deep seriousness, read one of his last poems, Aubade. It's a profoundly discomforting piece, honest to the point of painfulness. In it, he faces unflinchingly the night demons of the insomniac, which for him mean the grim reality of death. He is shaken to the core of his being. Morning light brings no relief, only the bleak awareness of the one fact that is incontrovertibly certain in life, that we must die one day. Advent is a good time to read it, this season when we meditate on the four Last Things: death, judgment, hell and heaven. Was the poem inspired by a memory of Haydon Bridge in winter on one of those days the North East does so well, when the bare hillsides crouch under the weight of lowering gunmetal skies and a mist hangs over the Tyne as it runs cold as the Styx between the stones of the bridge?

For people of faith, "Aubade" it is not the last word. Religion is - isn't it? - more than just a "vast, moth-eaten musical brocade / invented to pretend we never die". So we need other voices than Larkin's alone: John Donne's or George Herbert's perhaps, or a Bach Passion, or a painting like Grünewald's Crucifixion where we can glimpse how dying is the supreme act of faith because the crucified and risen Lord has walked this way before us. But we mustn't indulge our own pretence that death is not an awesome and an awful mystery. If the poets can give us the words and the courage to look into our own mortality, we must thank them for their gift, even if it's not a comfortable one.

If you're in our village and admire the Tyne "muscled with currents" as you stand on Haydon's Bridge, don't forget to nod in the direction of 1a Ratcliffe Road and the memory of a poet who pursued his truth and spoke it. And remember his words now immortalised in Poets' Corner: "What will survive of us is love".